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The other Meriwether sister
Remember Elizabeth Meriwether, the suffragist who helped start the Memphis chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? She shared her home with her brother- & sister-in-law, Lide Smith Meriwether. Lide was as devoted a suffragist as Elizabeth, and more…
Memphis Streetcar boycott
Within weeks of the murders, so much of Black Memphis had left town that the streetcar ridership collapsed. Men from the City Railway Co came to Ida B Wells' office, seeking to understand why Black riders had disappeared. Quotes from IBW's book…
The lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart
By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. Free Speech was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black…
Ida B. Wells, Owner & Editor
Ida B Wells didn’t love being a teacher, but as she built an adult life in Memphis, she began working as a reporter. Realizing that owning & editing her own paper was the only way to make a living as a journalist, Wells invested in The Memphis…
There's a lot of stuff on the world wide web
Way down the rabbit hole tonight. Memphis cartes de visites circa 1880s, many from a Gebhardt Studios on Beale Street that had both black & white patrons. A whole cache on Flickr, lovingly annotated circa 2015 by someone I can't identify in real…
Ida fights segregation on the railroad
Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power:…